We’re Gonna Rock! We’re Gonna Roll!
Josh Ahrens     [an in-class writing]

In 1951, Alan Freed coined the term “Rock ‘n’ Roll” on his Cleveland radio show, The Moondog Rock ‘n’ Roll Party blasted through suburban airwaves, broadcasting mostly black artists to a young, white audience. The following cultural Big Bang sent black and white America hurdling into one another, and Rock ‘n ‘ Roll stood as the primary venue for music to take its place in the tumultuous and glorious decades to come. The technical definition of Rock ‘n’ Roll is simple enough: A briskly paced, danceable music with a traditional blues structure, and emphasis on the rhythm section and off-beats. The nuts and bolts of Rock ‘n’ Roll are nothing unusual on their own. Jazz, R&B, Blues, Country, Western, and Hillbilly music had been around for decades, and Rock was the child of these. It is a style of music, but it is also a higher form of communication, and a call from, and to, the deepest, most pure, passionate part of us to reveal itself, and challenge whatever injustice present.

With the rise of television and radio, it was no longer possible to isolate oneself from unfamiliar music and culture. No longer did one have to go to the back yards of white farmers or honky-tonks to hear the unique sounds of Bluegrass, Country, or Western Swing, and likewise, it was no longer necessary to be in Harlem or the black neighborhoods of Chicago or Memphis to ever be exposed to Blues, or R&B. All the average teenager had to do was flick a switch, wait for the tubes to warm up and produce that exciting hum-fuzz, and twist the tuning knob, the sounds of Bo Diddley, The Carter Family, Little Richard, or Frank Sinatra, all on the same stretch of frequencies. The beauty of radio was that the listener had no idea what color the musician was!

The pulsing rhythm, tortured guitars, and energetic, uninhibited performers awoke a dormant part of young America that even the most convincing words of the most devoted and hateful bigots could never poison. It began in the 1950’s, by weaving back and forth a common thread between two cultures thought to be so distant and incompatible that they couldn’t even drink from the same fountains. Sam Phillips gave the end of that thread a good tug when he founded Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, 1952. Black immortals Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King played alongside Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, working together to create the unmistakable “Sun sound." These rock prophets evangelized their message with all the fury and intensity of the best Southern Baptist preachers and choirs. The first ever official Rock concert, The Moondog Coronation Ball, headlined black and white performers, and drew a crowd of 25,000 people, equal portions black and white. The Orioles made history with "Crying in the Chapel," the first song by black artists to top the white-dominated pop charts. Elvis toured with Sam Cooke, and black and white teens even danced together on the same floor on American Bandstand.

On December 1st, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Fats Domino was at the top of the charts with the teasing "Ain’t That a Shame." The defiant, raw, and unapologetic Rock ‘n’ Roll records embodied just the sort of justified anger and fantastic courage that Parks displayed that day. When Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas was integrated, Elvis’ Teddy Bear and Sam Cooke’s You Send Me, were going to number one on the same chart. From 1955 to 1959, the US market share of the four major record labels dropped from 78% to 44%, while the market share of independent record companies, most created primarily from the Rock craze, increased from 22% to 56%. The US market went from 213 million dollars to 603 million, and the market share of Rock ‘n’ Roll charged from 15.7% to 42.7%.

In the 1960’s, it brought into further question, now very openly and frankly, the policies, and behaviors of the American government, and social structures. Racial equality was what Rock ‘n’ Roll was made of. Despite the best efforts of the ruling record companies of the time, Capitol, RCA Victor, and Columbia to hijack Rock ‘n’ Roll, and repackage it as purely white, apolitical pop, the raw energy and brilliant talent of the black musicians was just too powerful to ignore. In the early 1960’s when the charts had become overrun with pop songs and novelty dances, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, James Brown, and others ripped it back from the clutches of mediocrity and set the soundtrack ablaze for one of the nation’s most intense decades.

Dylan’s "Blowin’ in the Wind" became the unofficial anthem of the activists in the 1960’s. James Brown sang, “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!”, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “It ain’t me! It ain’t me! I ain’t no senator’s son!” was blasted through the Haight-Ashbury and rural Iowa alike. Janis Joplin screamed out heartfelt soul songs of Aretha Franklin, and Dionne Warwick collaborated with Burt Bacharach. Rock musicians were free to verbalize what in the 1950’s was primarily expressed through the feel of the music. With such dire images on television as John F., and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations, the riots in Watts, and more and more names of the dead in Vietnam reaching home, our musicians were here as a remedy to our pain, and as a reminder that the human spirit and hope for a better tomorrow was and is still very much alive.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is entertainment, but Rock also challenges, motivates, and requires, begs of the listener to stand up and take his or her place in vocal defiance of the forces that plot undermine the human spirit, and have a little fun doing it. It is unmistakable, unapologetic honesty, made of the very same fibers that are woven into us at birth, incorruptible. The message of Rock ‘n’ Roll can neither be contained, nor subverted with mere words, and it calls to that part of each and every soul that once provoked, will rise up in brash, righteous defiance of the accepted, unjust norms of society, and blow them away like the feeble flames on short matchsticks that they were all along. One can know who he or she is, and what is right, but there is always that electricity that is a breaking point in every human, inspiring him or her to rebel, loudly, in the name of all that is right. That visceral feeling is what Rock ‘n’ Roll communicates and the very thing that makes it, well, Rock ‘n’ Roll.